Changing the world. One blog(ger) at a time.

Blogging in the eye of the storm

WARNING: I was high on caffeine, low on sweetness and off-the-charts on dry wit when I wrote this…

My pastor at church writes a short piece on the front of each weekend’s bulletin. This week’s words are particularly penetrating:

35,000 feet above the dusty plains of Pakistan, flying toward the 15 million people of Karachi, I studied yet another report on the re-positioning of nations in Godâ€™s world. After a mere half century, America is being replaced as the worldâ€™s leading nation.

America used to be the worldâ€™s biggest exporter, but is now surpassed by China. China also produces more cars than America. General Motors was the worldâ€™s largest auto company. This year Toyota has passed it. The American dollar is no longer the favoured form of cash. There are now more euros in circulation than dollars. Wall Streetâ€™s capitalisation has been eclipsed by Europe. Saudi Aramco now boasts bigger revenues than the worldâ€™s biggest listed company, Exxon Mobil. On purchasing power parity, China will be number one within 4 years. Its GDP will pass Americaâ€™s by 2027. On current trends China will win more gold medals at Beijing than America.

This century China will also have the worldâ€™s most powerful Christian church. Its missionaries are already appearing in the toughest countries I visit.

Bring it on, Lord!

Religious sensibilities aside, this short message from my pastor very consisely paints the picture of the world of today: rapid, unceasing change! And for most of us humble humans, change means pain, confronting fear and accepting a difficult-to-verbalize sense of angst deep in our souls.

But it gets worse for us bloggers! We’re dealing with this thing called the World Wide Web, which has never stood still even for one moment. Heck, it’s hard enough keeping up with WordPress updates, let along new plugins, new widgets, new websites, new services, new social networks, new forms of communication, new promotion strategies, new tricks, and… new emails!

There are so many distractions online, it’s hard sometimes to remember what we were doing here in the first place. I have the far-too-regular 3pm headaches to prove that (it feels like) I’m barely holding on from day to day. How about you?

As I have repeatedly written in one form or other, blogging is not about writing posts. Heck, that’s the least of your challenges. No, blogging is about cultivating a mutually beneficial relationships with an ever-growing online readership, and that’s hard work. And worse still, there are so many ways you are told to do that:

(numbered for easy reference by commenters)

You should challenge/encourage/woo/entice readers to leave more comments, because good blogs have lots of comments.

You should be reading the posts and comments on similar blogs to yours so that you can add your own comments there, and (as it were) promote yourself, get links and “be part of the conversation”.

You should be regularly adding new feeds to your newsreader and always looking for new and interesting writers.

You should take the time to study the content of your competitors’ blogs to look for ideas for your next post.

You should keep up with the latest ideas/tricks/techniques for promoting your blog and should be experimenting all the time with a new link-bait and SEO ideas, so that (ultimately) you rank better in Google and in other search engines, and get more search traffic.

You should be twittering about every hour or so with witty and pithy commentary on the mundanity of your daily activities (trying not to feel so so lame because, unlike Chris Pirillo, you’re not always in a recording studio, airport or funky nightclub).

You should be joining MyBlogLog, Twitter, Bumpzee, BlogCatalog, Digg and a load of other social network sites/services if you haven’t already, because these are the places to “network” with other people in your niche, and in the blogosphere generally.

You should be building your friends lists up on all these services because everyone knows your success on Digg, Netscape, MyBlogLog and the other social voting/bookmarking sites is directly proportional to the number of friends (i.e. people you’ve never met) you have.

You should be following up each blog you post with emails out to some of the gurus and thought leaders and uber-bloggers in your niche in the hope that they will a) read your email, b) link through to your post, c) read it, d) love it, e) post about it on their blog or f) add your blog to their blogroll or g) submit your story to Digg.

You should aim for about a post a day, making sure to write “quality content”. Meaning you need to be original but not bleeding-edge, funny ha-ha but not funny weird, comprehensive but not boring, structured but not fragmented, insightful but not impenetrably dense. Got it?

You should comprehensively “tag” every post so it is properly indexed by Technorati and other tagging services.

You should take particular notice (in your stats) of the “long-tail” of your search engine referral traffic, and where you see repeated phrases and keywords, use these as ideas for future posts, in order to get more targeted traffic from search engines.

You should use email, discussion groups, mailing lists, phone, fax, telex and carrier pigeon to cultivate an “informal” collective of diggers/stumblers/redditers/delishers and you should use the aforementioned modes of communication to (carefully and selectively) request “help” to get your best posts submitted/voted on/promoted.

You should participate in carefully chosen discussion forums that are a close match for the kind of readership you want on your blog. The nicer and more helpful you are the more people will follow you back to your blog.

You should cultivate a relationship with the A-list blogger/s in your niche with a view to offering or being asked to write a guest post on their blog; not for the traffic but for the respect you will gain from a different/larger readership.

You should buy a phone that has a built-in camera, broadband connection and blogging facility so you can feel less like a technological neanderthal and more like Scoble or Justin with your moblogging prowess.

And finally…

You should — on a scheduled and regular basis — be standing apart (completely dispassionately) from your blogging to gain a sense of balance and perspective on your efforts, in order to be able to review and adjust your “workflow”, choice of tools, and approach. You will need to accommodate technological change, shifts in expectation of your readership, and the greater and greater need to cater to a Chinese readership, where the real money and traffic is.

Obviously it goes without saying that you have a day job and a family and all that stuff, so don’t get too intense about all the above… it’s designed to fit fairly neatly into an hour before work and a couple of hours in the evening after the kids have gone to bed. You have a real life going on too, after all!

Alister, this is the best post I’ve ever seen that sums up the frustration of trying to keep up. I’m a pretty technologically savvy guy, an early adopter and such but blogging…. wow. You nailed it! Thanks for lightening my day.

Perhaps all of these ‘rules’ are made up by people like us who are trying to figure out how to make the dip deeper for new entrants. Deep enough so they will want to use the points as a checklist, and still join to worship those who apparently ‘made it’; yet not too deep because we need newbies to have veterans.

It’s the psychology that still underlies the economic engine. Yet those who figure out how to change the game, and not play by the rules, still win.

As for brand America — I just wrote about how the Mayor of Charleston, SC has built a city with and for the community. We need more of those people in places where they can make that kind of difference, regardless of political beliefs.

I guess you have to do all that in case you want to revenue from your blog. You have to play the game. But what about people who are content with few faithful readers and still like to share their thoughts with them? Am I coming from a different world?

I love this post. 😀 There’s been a pressing question I’ve had to ask myself in regards to blogging: “I can’t network in real life, so how in the blue blinkie dinkies am I supposed to do it online?!?!?!”

I think people should just blog for the sake of blogging, and if you’re unique enough, and your content is engaging enough, people will come to you. Let everything else from Digg to MyBlogLog to Google be damned to hell.

Hi. Here for the first time. I thought your post was hilarious!!! Sums up all the eggs I’ve been juggling for the past few months being a new blogger and all. As for wordpress, updates were the least of my problems. Had to figure out how the dang thing worked for starters! Had a headache for 2 weeks after upgrading to 2.1. I write lists of what I want to accomplish for each day/week and gradually tick them off as I do them. Most of all I try to have a laugh about things especially when I’m feeling swamped. I was grinning until the end of your post. You are hereby favourited, bookmarked and subscribed to. Have a blessed day.

An excellent post, I was smiling but also nodding my head in agreement as I think, bar no 22, that I have done all of the above. Trouble is I enjoy the part that entails visiting other blogs because of social networking memberships and mutual ‘I’ll pat your back, you pat mine’ submission sites. I end up totally off track often with 30 plus Firefox tabs still open when I finally call it a night. Lots of research gets done but very little posting. I have learned a lot about increasing my site traffic when I do post more though and did you know that Willis Island 400k off the coast of Australia has a population of 10,000 (birds) and 4 meteorologists (they are the humans).

One more tip about comments and engaging your audience. Most readers don’t engage. Thats why we created ClickComments to make it easier for more readers to engage with your blog simply with one click. Please check it out.

wow the great job and the tips are really awesome and really helpful to get the best and to maintain the blog that is really effective.
i would like to generate a community that is really special for the muslim onlile network…

be built… Lisa isn t too worried about she built Unreality TV up mostly on organic SEO! Their battle Using Squidoo to Market Your Website . The other great thing about Squidoo is that you can SEO your lens as well. This means that if you Blogging in the eye of the storm and should be experimenting all the time with a new link-bait and SEO ideas, so that (ultimately) you So you want to become an SEO consultant? | Tim Nash the IT Consultant here (yahoo) here (msn) More about Me

– my followup post to Alister’s. I am going to cheat and just stick an RSS feed here in the post, it is just a list of bloggers who linked through to Alister’s post (you can do some fun things with RSS) Blogging in the eye of the stormGoogle en blogpostsHow Google Ranks Blog PostsWikis Gone WildEarning Money Blog Reading Tips – 23 April 2007Best of Feeds – 36 links – humor, programming, code, tips, gmail, seolinks for 2007-04-21This Week In SEO – 4/20/07

which might make for some worthwhile reading if youâ€™re looking for something to do over the weekend. ProNet Advertising shares why the Digg Button Gets Your Buried, Not Dugg Another great read today is from Alister Cameron – Blogging in the eye of the storm – enjoy. Advertisement: Make Money with Chitika eMiniMalls Cost Per Click Advertising for your Blog

blogging in the eye of the storm, including all the things bloggers need to do and be signed up for and how often to write and how to build readership and so on and so on. in fact, reading the list itself wore me out! it also made me feel very behind the times. as i read it, i

digging, bumping, favoriting, faming, fuelling, stumbling, submitting, tagging, dobbing* , befriending. If I have missed out a particular term used by a social networking site, please let me know. Alister puts it beautifully when he says “everyone knows your success on … social voting/bookmarking sites is directly proportional to the number of friends (i.e. people youâ€™ve never met)” The following don’t take me much time unfortunately as Alister has not met a lot more people than I have not met. commenting, thanking for comments, commenting on comments, researching the best way to comment, thank for comments and comment on

[…] there were a feature to Posted in AzMz Blog ( 0 links from 0 sites) Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:55:32 GMT Blogging in the eye of the storm WARNING: I was high on caffeine, low on sweetness and off-the-charts on dry wit when I wrote […]

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[…] WARNING: I was high on caffeine, low on sweetness and off-the-charts on dry wit when I wrote this… My pastor at church writes a short piece on the front of each weekend’s bulletin. This week’s words are particularly penetrating: 35,000 feet above the dusty plains of Pakistan, flyin. (continues) […]

[…] be doing to improve your blog writing? If so, you might enjoy the tongue-in-cheek list of 22 blogging “shoulds” by Alister Cameron, ‘blogologist’. I love number 14: You should aim for about a post a […]

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